Curating as graphic design research
(2022)
author(s): Sara De Bondt
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In 2019, I curated and designed Off the Grid, an exhibition on post-war Belgian graphic design at Design Museum Gent. The show included public events (Design Museum Gent, 2019–20) and led to a publication (De Bondt, 2022), all of which have been elements of my practice-based doctoral research at KASK School of Arts and Ghent University.
Curating Off the Grid allowed me to define my own research area, namely the investigation of graphic design from a specific country and period. The process also raised broader questions around naming, authorship, and canon-formation, which in turn have enriched my practice as a designer and educator. The curatorial thus became a methodology that allowed me to bring the two sides — my historical research and my graphic design practice — together. In this article, I discuss my engagement with graphic design via the curatorial, and how the latter can be deployed for practice-based graphic design research in and beyond exhibition spaces.
The primary knowledge about cane, by Theophrastus.
(2022)
author(s): Christos Tsogias-Razakov
published in: Research Catalogue
The following material is a short excerpt from the master’s research exposition: THE IMPORTANCE OF ARUNDO DONAX CANE SELECTION, FOR MANUFACTURERS OF OBOE REEDS (2020) by Christos Tsogias-Razakov. It is mentioned that already from the period of classical antiquity existed methods that helped manufacturers to make playable reeds for the instruments of that time.
Telescopic Listening
(2020)
author(s): Eivind Buene
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In contemporary music, the ethos of experimentation and newness is constantly confronted with a strong historical presence. The historical residue in the apparatus of production and dissemination can be found in the instrumentation, institutions and formats of performance. Certain periods in time, like that of post-war modernism tried to eviscerate that residue, other periods have seen a keen interest in evoking history, for a variety of reasons. Eivind Buene’s ongoing project Schubert Lounge probes notions of historicity in an explicit way, taking songs of Franz Schubert as a starting point for the investigation. The work challenges the idea of authenticity in musical performance through applying methodologies from one layer in time to materials from a different historical moment. In the project he tries to create a multi-layered experience through a process of ‘telescopic listening’, as different modes of interpretation and creation is brought into conflict in a staged work for singers, ensemble and turntable with recorded sound.
Demmin – letting a city sound
(2020)
author(s): Mareike Nele Dobewall
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The project ’Demmin – eine Stadt zum Klingen bringen’ (’Demmin – letting a city sound’) explores the history and stories of the German city of Demmin in a dialogue between the local choir, Peenechor, and the site of Haus Demmin. During a two-week workshop the choir and Mareike Dobewall explored how to vocalise other stories, of the inhabitants of Demmin and the two decaying buildings known collectively as Haus Demmin (the ruins of an 11th century fortress and a former mansion). In a sonic dialogue between ageing voices and decaying architecture a vocal performance in the open air was created. Stories, history and fairy tales took new shape through vocal music, and un-listened sound was given presence. The site-determined performance allowed for the memory and the imagination of the visitors and the participants to rise up and become a part of a holistic experience.
50 Billion Micrograms. In the Search of the Aftermath of an Event
(2019)
author(s): Christine Hansen
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition provides an example of how art can offer an alternative way of understanding the past through my work “50 Billion Micrograms”. The project explored a forgotten media event from 1979, in which a gigantic meteorite supposedly landed in a remote lake on the west coast of Norway. The exposition attempts to demonstrate how ambiguity was a fuel the project. In the process what I call "fluctuating thinking" was an important method. This meant that I let seemingly irrelevant and speculative elements be part of the process. In this process, the different conceptual and aesthetic elements had to be studied carefully to consider whether random ideas and speculative elements were relevant for the work. However, such an open-ended approach is often fundamental to artistic research, I argue. I had no hope of finding the answer about the meteorite or explaining this natural phenomenon. My interest was to dwell on the uncertainty and keep the wondering alive. What became increasingly important was to explore the search itself through images and sound. The exposition also ask what is an event, what keeps an event alive? Were does fact and fiction interlace?
Hans Schleif
(2019)
author(s): Julian Klein
published in: Research Catalogue
Among the members of the Archaeological Institute of the German Reich, the architectural historian Hans Schleif was notable for the extent of his involvement with the crimes of the National Socialist regime. His achievements in scientific research, for instance as director of excavations at Olympia, are overshadowed by his career in the SS. He was director of the Excavation Department of the »Ahnenerbe« (ancestral heritage) of the SS. After the German invasion of Poland he was briefly appointed Custodian of German Cultural Assets based in Posnan. In 1943, he joined the SS Head Office for Economic and Administrative Affairs and rose to the position of deputy to C Group (Construction) director, Dr. Hans Kammler, whose permanent representative in the Jäger- und Rüstungsstab task force he became. In this role, Schleif was responsible above all for moving key arms production facilities underground, where fighter planes and the »reprisal weapons« V1 and V2 were built – hence for the largely subterranean concentration and slave labour camps of the Sonderstab Kammler. His grand- son, the actor Matthias Neukirch, created a theatre production about Schleif in collaboration with stage director Julian Klein at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. This text is a result of the research undertaken for the production, and reports on selected stages in Schleif’s biography.
Record, Rewind, Rewrite. Acoustic Historiography with the Presidential Tapes
(2017)
author(s): Monika Dommann
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
A tool of audio manipulation available to all (recording, fast-forwarding and rewinding, dictating, deleting, overwriting, etc.), tape recorders became a universal feature of offices and living rooms in the 1950s. Between 1962 (when John F. Kennedy installed a secret recording system in his Oval Office) and July 1973 (when Richard Nixon’s extensive recording system was revealed in the aftermath of Watergate and switched off on 18 July) (Haldeman 1988: 86), taping was even used by American presidents as a secret memo technique. From the perspective of the history of knowledge and media studies, this article examines the explosive political force of sidestepping the ephemerality of verbal communication through the secret tape recordings, historical and archival examinations of the Presidential Tapes and their remixes in Public History and film projects, where communicative acts once concealed from the public now continue as endless media loops. A paradoxical form of acoustic nostalgia emerges here: It tackles the problem of invisible power and ritualised politics with a sensorially-accessible “presence” and acoustically-perceptible corporeality – drawing on media in the process. The plea for acoustic historiography developed in this article is an examination of the soundscapes previously neglected by historiography but augmented by media history. While historiography, up to the 20th century, could record the sounds, tones and voices of the past only through writing, the Soundscape Projects initiated by R. Murray Schafer since the 1970s used tape to store and document sound and to create acoustic archives. Since the 1990s, the digitalization of analogue magnetic tapes has facilitated previously inconceivable access to acoustic sources and contributed to the rise of Public History within general societal awareness. Acoustic historiography must therefore engage with the media characteristics of recording and playback devices; the social situations in which recordings are produced; the potential of acoustic sources for storage, manipulation and transmission and their use in art, politics and society.
Eight to Infinite
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Alex Jovcic-Sas
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Eight to Infinite is an exciting collaborative project between electronic artist Afrodeutsche and PhD researcher, Alex Jovčić-Sas. The aim is to revise two unknown historical composers, Gertrud Grunow (Bauhaus) and Daphne Oram (BBC), by writing, recording, and performing a new work that uses their archival materials combined with contemporary digital compositional tools. Grunow and Oram worked with optical sound as a process for composing music, specifically focusing on colours and shapes as compositional tools. They both have been largely overlooked within their respective institutional histories and this project will bring to life their unique and rich compositional practices.
Eight to Infinite took place on the 7th of October 2021, at the Space at Nottingham Contemporary. Eight to Infinite was generously funded by Arts Council England, Midlands4Cities, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham Contemporary, and PRS Foundation.
Theobald Böhm and the Böhm Flute
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Joana Machado
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Theobald Böhm (1794-1881) was a German acclaimed flautist, composer and flute maker who changed the course of flute history in several ways. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, Böhm created a new and improved flute. The Böhm flute due to its several developments, is to this day a great system.
Ebifananyi : a study of photographs in Uganda in and through an artistic practice
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Andrea Stultiens
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In Luganda, the widest spoken minority language in Uganda, the word for photographs is 'ebifananyi'. However, 'ebifananyi' does not, contrary to the etymology of the word photographs, relate to light writings. 'Ebifananyi' instead means things that look like something else. 'Ebifananyi' are likenesses.
This research project of Andrea Stultiens explores the historical context of this particular conceptualisation of photographs and its consequences for present day visual culture in Uganda. It also discusses the artistic practice as research method, which led to the digitisation of numerous historical collections of photographs. This resulted in eight books and in exhibitions that took place in Uganda and in Europe.
The research was conducted in collaboration with both human and non-human actors. These actors included photographs, their owners, Ugandan picture makers and visitors to the exhibitions that were organised in Uganda and Western Europe. This methodology led to insights into differences in the production and uses of, and into meanings given to, photographs in both Ugandan and Dutch contexts.
Understanding differences between ebifananyi and photographs shapes the communication about photographs between Luganda and English speakers. Reflection on the conceptualisations languages offer for objects and for sensible aspects of the surrounding world helps prevent misunderstandings in communication in general.
Shaping Garments
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Peter Wertmann
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Overview and research Archive From the first published paper pattern making techniques to The more recent techniques.
The role of music theory in professional music education, a historic overview [Snapshot from dev system - 2022-12-06 14:40]
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Patrick van Deurzen
connected to: KC Research Portal
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In the 19th century, we can observe a growing gap between what we call now music theoretical books and the development of music. As Robert Wason writes in his overview of “Musica practica: music theory as pedagogy”: “These [19th century harmony] books are symptomatic of the dearth of new ideas, and the irrelevance that pedagogical theory was falling into: (…) neither a theory nor a pedagogy of ‘Nineteenth -Century Harmony’ ever really seemed to get under way.”
In this research, I try to unravel possible aspects that have a relation to this problem. One of these aspects has to do with the fact that a lot of what we call music theory origins from a compositional practice. Therefore, at the end of this research, I also made a start to describe music theoretical training that has no origin in this compositional practice.
This exposition is still in progress.